Events
Engaging our communities
Utopia Opening Night: Wildness
Wu Tsang and Roya Rastegar
We’ll kick off this year’s Scholar & Feminist Conference on Utopia with a screening of Wu Tsang and Roya Rastegar’s film Wildness, a magical and explosive exploration of “safe space,” queer community, creativity, and class. Set in the historic Silver Platter, a Los Angeles bar that has been a home for Latin/LBGT immigrant communities since […]
Read MoreWorlds of Shange
Jennifer DeVere Brody, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Alexis Pauline Gumbs ’04, Vanessa K. Valdés, and more
In a culture in which black women’s stories have been consistently marginalized, Ntozake Shange ’70 unflinchingly delved into experiences of “colored girls” in America, transcending genre and defying expectations with several of the most powerful and lyrical works of art in the twentieth century. This February, the Africana Studies Program, the Consortium for Critical Interdisciplinary […]
Read MorePerforming Shange
Ntozake Shange ’70, Dianne McIntyre, Ebonie Smith ’07, and Student Performers
Playwright and poet Ntozake Shange ’70 has been a defining voice of African American experience since the production of her Obie Award winning masterwork, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, in 1975. To help kickoff the daylong conference, “The Worlds of Ntozake Shange,” Shange joins acclaimed dance artist Dianne […]
Read MoreFeminism and Beyond: Young Feminists Take on Activism and Organizing
Lena Chen, Jessica Danforth, Dior Vargas, Sydnie Mosley ’07, Julie Zeilinger ’15, and Dina Tyson ’13
Young feminists have long battled invisibility. Countless media articles bemoan young women’s lack of activism or suggest that movements that “go viral,” like SlutWalk or Occupy Wall Street, have come out of nowhere. In fact, feminism among young people is as active as ever, constantly pushing boundaries both inside and outside feminist communities and engaging […]
Read MoreHuman Rights Day Panel: Sonia Pierre and the Struggle for Citizenship in the Dominican Republic
Miriam Neptune, Manuela Pierre, Ninaj Raoul, and Monisha Bajaj
Sonia Pierre (1963-2011), mobilized communities in the Dominican Republic to advocate for citizenship and human rights for Dominicans of Haitian descent. At age 13, Pierre led strike to improve working conditions for sugar cane cutters in the batey where she was born. As the director of Movimiento de Mujeres Dominico-Haitiana (MUDHA), she used legal challenges […]
Read MoreMuslim Women, Activism, and New Media Cultures
Ousseina Alidou and others
Many scholars within a variety of disciplines have begun to examine the ways in which new media technologies in the Muslim world have helped amplify discussions and debates about the role and meaning of Islam in everyday life. This panel will consider how women in different Muslim contexts, who may or may not identify with […]
Read MoreStigma, Precarity, and the Everyday Life of Outcaste Labor
Anupama Rao
What forms of critical thought and cultural production are enabled by intersections between stigmatized life and the social experience of labor in twentieth-century Bombay? In her latest project, Barnard College Associate Professor of History Anupama Rao critically engages traditional approaches to labor, examining how the practices of precarious workers, such as India’s Dalits, impact the […]
Read MoreNtozake Shange on Stage and Screen
Ntozake Shange, Soyica Diggs Colbert, and Monica Miller
The 2012-13 Africana Distinguished Alumna Series honors one of Barnard’s most distinguished African American alumnae: Ntozake Shange ’70. A playwright, poet, and novelist of startling originality, Shange is best known for her 1975 Obie Award-winning play, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf. Following the screening of Tyler Perry’s acclaimed […]
Read MoreWomen Poets at Barnard
Anne Carson and Alice Oswald
Celebrated poets Anne Carson and Alice Oswald read from their recent works, followed by a reception. Anne Carson is a poet and classics scholar. Her books of poetry include Glass, Irony and God; Plainwater; Autobiography of Red; The Beauty of the Husband, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry in 2001; and NOX. She […]
Read MoreMoving Images: Psychoanalytically-Informed Methods in Documenting the Lives of Women Migrants and Asylum-Seekers
Janice Haaken
Many contemporary feminist projects attempt to subvert the male gaze by “bearing witness” to female trauma through visual representation. Yet these projects have tended to be under-theorized. Since visual images invoke the spectator’s experience of unmediated access to the inner world of the subject, the evocative power of photographic images may readily reproduce forms of […]
Read MoreStaking Our Claim: Trans Women’s Literature in the 21st Century
Imogen Binnie, Ryka Aoki, Donna Ostrowsky, Red Durkin, and Tourmaline
As our notions of feminism have evolved over the last several decades, so too has the body of literature by and about trans women. In this fiction reading and panel sponsored by the Barnard Library, celebrating the release of The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard (Topside Press, 2012), four trans women authors will […]
Read MoreRace, Gender, and the New Biocitizen
Dorothy Roberts
Some writers have celebrated a new biological citizenship arising from individuals’ unprecedented ability to manage their health at the molecular level. In this year’s Helen Pond McIntyre ’48 lecture, Dorothy Roberts examines the role of race and gender in the construction of this new biocitizen in light of the current expansion of race-based, reproductive, and […]
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